Treviño was in that first group. The now-defunct program was called Becas para Aztlán (I've seen it referred to Becas de Aztlán, as well).

I find it interesting that a foreign power had to supplement the resources to get Mexican-American kids into college back then. One year older than Treviño, I can tell you those resources were relatively skimpy for kids like Treviño. He is the son of a hard-working janitor who moonlighted as a busboy at a local hotel and also bought and restored old pick-up trucks here and sold them in his home state of Coahuila.

There have been definite improvements since 1973 but I wonder if enough has changed.

Last year, the Pew Research Center's Hispanic Trends Project reported record college-going rates for the nation's Hispanics. The caveats were instructive, however.

Young Hispanic college students are far less likely than their white peers to attend a four-year or selective college; less likely to attend full-time; and less likely to get a bachelor's degree. And while high school dropout rates have improved, they are still worrisome.

What Treviño teaches us is the power of investment. He essentially went from first-year community college to medical student in Mexico.

He doesn't remember getting much, if any, guidance about college, though he was a top student at Brackenridge. But he knew he wanted to be a doctor. This came from his experiences as he saw his younger siblings born. He was the translator for his parents at the hospital.

Treviño started school without English and, in Catholic elementary school, the nuns told his parents that he would have to repeat first grade. But his father made him memorize the multiplication tables. And when he returned, the nuns showed off his skills to the other students and advanced him.

“My first language wasn't English, my Spanish was very rudimentary. My first language was math,” he said.

Treviño escaped the projects but has not abandoned the area. He, his siblings and his parents own homes within blocks of one another in the same neighborhood where they grew up. And his clinics are still helping San Antonians.

Pew had another tidbit to offer. Eighty-eight percent of Hispanics agreed in a 2009 survey that a college education is necessary. Lack of knowledge about college, for immigrant parents in particular, doesn't mean lack of desire that their children succeed.

Now, if only Texas and the rest of the nation could conclude that allowing the fastest growing population to continue to lag in educational attainment, despite the improved college-going rate, is a recipe for failure — for Hispanics and for the state and nation.

This requires intervention, homegrown, of the kind Treviño got from Mexico. It requires the kind of funding and focus that will allow public schools to be equal to the task. Treviño is proof that such investments, wherever they come from, pay dividends.